Campaigns

A campaign is an operations problem more than a creative one. The brief has to be specific enough to execute without repeated clarification, approvals have to move in days rather than weeks, and payment has to go out on time or the creators worth keeping stop replying. This path covers the full run, from writing the brief through to closing the campaign out.

Gifting, seeding and ambassador programmes are covered here too, because they are campaign structures rather than separate channels. Each has a different cost profile and a different failure mode: gifting is cheap and unreliable, seeding scales but needs volume, and ambassador programmes take the longest to set up and return the most once running.

The brief is where most campaign problems are created. Vague briefs produce work that has to be revised, and revisions are where timelines and goodwill both go. Specify the hook, the deliverable format and length, what has to be said, what must not be said, and the deadline. Leave the creative execution to the creator, because that is the thing you are actually paying for.

Approvals are the other bottleneck, and the fix is process rather than effort. Decide before launch who approves, what counts as a valid revision request, and how many rounds are included. Two rounds is standard. Campaigns that leave this open end up with a creator on their fourth unpaid revision and a brand wondering why nobody wants to work with them again.